miklos jancso

A later film from Jancso, dating from 1991 and very topical at that. It deals very specifically with the fall of Communism as embodied by the Soviet coup against Gorbachev of that same year. Jancso was nothing if not au courant; God Walks Backwards is dizzying in its simultaneous immediacy and depthless irony.

Most of the film takes place in and around a mostly empty mansion staked with television screens and cameras, as the old Communist guard, newly-minted democrats, and hedonistic, cynical youth play out the end of Communism as a farce. The democrats are hypocrites, denying their past complicity to buy into the latest set of rhetoric that will keep them in power. The hard-liners are clueless and pathetic; they tremble just as the leaders of the coup did. And the youth walk around with a video camera and a silent, naked woman in tow (sexist, yes, but too true), shooting the action as though it were for nothing but their own entertainment. Jancso’s long shots pass over the television screens that present both the action in the mansion and the concurrent broadcasts of the Soviet coup. A tank rolls into the yards with a rock star on top (and that naked woman again), and these “democrats” kill everyone, including the youth.

It is the most effective presentation of Debordian spectacle in film that I have ever seen, revealing Michael Haneke as the amateur shock artiste that he is, and more remarkable given that Jancso abandoned his more classicist leanings to adopt an uglier, harsher contemporary style, all electricity and hum. (Though shot on film, it often looks amazingly video-like.) There are the obvious points about the inevitable hypocrisy of the transition from Communism to something else and of the emptying of the assorted rhetoric. The fragmentation brought by perestroika is there too, in more comprehensible form (to me, at least) than in Kira Muratova’s href=http://waggish.org/2005/03/kira_muratova_the_asthenic_syn.html>The Asthenic Syndrome. For such a blatantly political and allegorical film, Jancso never does bring a polemic to the table, and the final self-reflexive scene, in which the actors and crew themselves are subsumed first by decadence and then by machine gun fire, is Jancso’s acknowledgement that such sincerity could never be: they too are an instrumental part of the joke.